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(Maria Chimishkyan)
If we’re going to have to face another bout of pandemic uncertainty, then, hey: We at least deserve some good tunes.This week, our culture writer Spencer Kornhaber summarized the year in music, picking his top 10 albums.

Guillermo del Toro has always had a special fondness for misfits and monsters. His Hellboy films made superheroes out of paranormal beings, while his most recent Oscar-winning film, The Shape of Water, spun a tender romance between a mute woman and an amphibious fish-man. That the writer-director would take on Nightmare Alley next makes sense. The melancholic thriller about a carnival con man is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham that was adapted for the big screen once before, in 1947.

My first sight of it came one morning in June, as I rode the ferry through the Bosporus strait: a toxic glint on the sea’s surface. I initially thought it was oil, spilled from one of the many large container ships that pass through Istanbul via the Bosporus. Yet as we neared the glint, a sallow sludge marbled the water around the boat. In some areas, it was as thick and buoyant as fiberglass insulation.

The day the World Health Organization labeled Omicron a “variant of concern” felt as heavy as any since the pandemic had begun, and I was listening to Pee-wee Herman crack bad jokes with a talking chair. For one night, his puppet friends from Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the hit children’s TV show from the ’80s, had reunited on the radio for an hour of banter and old soul records.

What do we mean, exactly, when we refer to a piece of technology? The answer will help determine whether the United States can maintain its technological superiority over China. Technology takes three distinct forms. It’s an embodied tool, like the pots, pans, or oven in a kitchen. It’s written instruction, like patents, blueprints, or a cake recipe. And it’s process knowledge—the irreplaceable, hard-won practical experience that’s too difficult to write down.